Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

This may well have been the case, but a more recent investigation concludes that retention rates were gradually improving in the Red Army. In the most insightful examination of this process to date, Joshua Sanborn dates the beginning of it to a decree passed at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets on 10 July 1918 that linked citizenship to military service and obliged all healthy men aged 18–40 years to come forward.111 Improvements thereafter he attributes to the Soviet state building an apparatus that could be seen to apportion the burden of mobilization at least reasonably fairly among its citizens—the crucial factor being that the system was one that was central, not local, and therefore perceived to be less open to abuses.112 In sum, Sanborn concluded, the Bolsheviks “created a state-sponsored discourse that finally incorporated the idea that soldiers acquired rights when they performed their national duty.” In particular, they were assured that their families would be cared for and that they, as soldiers, would be respected by the state and would acquire privileges above those granted to other citizens.113 Tied to this, though, was a degree of flexibility in the approach of the state. The Red Army could, of course, unleash terror against those who deserted, and by April 1919 the Anti-Desertion Commission had established numerous branches at local levels, which organized armed patrols to comb the countryside and snare runaways and had the power to confiscate property from the families of known deserters and those suspected of assisting or harboring them.114 But, as Sanborn notes, commanders actually used a “two-pronged” approach to desertion. This was reflected in an order by Lenin of December 1918 in which, while describing deserters as “heinous and shameful” and representative of “the depraved and ignorant,” he nevertheless offered a two-week amnesty for those absentees who returned to their units. This was accompanied by a nationwide propaganda campaign to convince shirkers and deserters that they could not hide and would be punished, while the Red Army Central Desertion Commission urged that repression be mixed with “proof of concern for the families of Red Army soldiers.”115 Finally, an intensive and extensive “verification” campaign seems to have been particularly effective throughout 1919, during which all those men of draft age in the Soviet zone were required to attend meetings at which their eligibility for military service would be checked. Of course, given the ongoing chaos, this was never applied universally, but in the second half of 1919, 2,239,604 men attended such meetings and 272,211 of them were then enrolled in the armed forces. By August 1920, a further 470,106 men were recruited by this means. Thus, noted Sanborn, “a military service consensus had been reached and conscription normalized.”116 Certainly the White forces never came close to emulating this—although their failure to do so had as much to do with a lack of administrative resources in the peripheral areas in which they operated as with ignorance of the importance of such systems of social control. On the Red side, the results were clear: a Red Army of 800,000 men in January 1919 would become one of 3,000,000 by January 1920.117

White Defeat

The Red versus White struggle was decided on the battlefield, but the outcome of civil wars also depends on the contenders’ ability, through politics and propaganda, to convince people to fight for them (or at least not to raise arms against them). In this field, governance, the Whites were a spectacular failure. Consequently, no matter how successful their main military thrusts were, when the tide turned and advances morphed into retreats, the Whites had nothing to fall back on. Hence the precipitous collapse of the AFSR, the North-West Army, and Kolchak’s Russian Army.